The last decade has witnessed a dramatic growth in the amount of digital imagery captured and stored. This growth has been fueled by the advent of inexpensive digital cameras and camera-embedded mobile devices, as well as the abundance and increasing popularity of various channels for sharing images on the World Wide Web. The vast amounts of captured digital imagery and the fact that most of it comes from non-professional photographers underscores the need for effective automatic photo enhancement tools.
Indeed, virtually all existing photo management packages offer various automatic enhancement tools. However, most of these automatic approaches operate obliviously to higher-level image content and their results leave considerable room for improvement. A number of content-aware enhancement methods have been recently proposed, however the automatic methods among these mostly focus on global tone and color corrections.